4 at State Dept. resign after Benghazi report

Families of 3 San Diegans killed in consulate attack want more answers

Patricia Smith, of Clairemont, the mother of slain State Department information specialist Sean Smith, has been critical of the administration’s handling of the Benghazi attack. She said the report and resignations have changed nothing.

“Nobody’s admitting to anything,” she said. “I see no difference whatsoever. It’s all a big cover up. I’m not happy with it. It just does not seem right.”

Panel co-chairman Thomas Pickering, a retired ambassador, said security precautions were “grossly inadequate” and the contingent was overwhelmed by the heavily armed militants.

They did the best they possibly could with what they had but what they had wasn’t enough,” Pickering said.

Pickering and Mullen spoke shortly after briefing members of Congress in private. Lawmakers from both parties emerged from the sessions with harsh words for the State Department.

Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the House intelligence committee, said security was “plainly inadequate, intelligence collection needs to be improved, and our reliance on local militias was sorely misplaced.

“These are not mistakes we can afford to make again,” he said.

The House intelligence committee chairman, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., said the report laid bare “the massive failure of the State Department at all levels, including senior leadership, to take action to protect our government employees abroad,” and complained that no one was being held accountable.

Rogers also said he was dissatisfied with the lack of progress in finding the attackers.

Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security who was in charge of embassy protection, testified in October before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and defended the security measures.

“I made the best decisions I could with the information I had,” Lamb said at the time. “We had the correct number of assets in Benghazi at the time of 9/11.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a letter, thanked the board for its “clear-eyed, serious look at serious systemic challenges” and said she accepted its 29 recommendations, some of which she said are already in the works.

They include increasing by several hundred the number of Marine guards stationed at diplomatic missions worldwide; relying less on local security forces for protection at embassies, consulates and other offices; and increasing hiring and deployment of highly trained Diplomatic Security agents at at-risk posts.

The report offers minute-by-minute details of the Benghazi attack.

Killed first was State Department information specialist Sean Smith, a San Diego native who graduated from Mission Bay High School. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was declared dead at a Benghazi hospital, apparently taken there by good Samaritans who discovered him in the compound building.

Finally, the former SEALs were killed by mortars at their positions atop a building. Doherty and Woods were contractors working for the CIA.

The report says that within hours of being notified, Embassy Tripoli chartered a private airplane and deployed a seven-person security team, which included two U.S. military personnel, to Benghazi. But it also concluded that there wasn’t enough time given the speed of the attacks for armed U.S. military assets to have made a difference.

The board determined that there had been no immediate, specific tactical warning of a potential attack on the 11th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. But the report said there had been several worrisome incidents before to the attack that should have set off warning bells.

Staff writer Nathan Max and the Associated Press contributed to this report.